


No Unnecessary Space

by lesyeuxverts



Category: The Bedlam Stacks - Natasha Pulley
Genre: First Kiss, First Time, M/M, human/statue sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 13:49:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17044898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesyeuxverts/pseuds/lesyeuxverts
Summary: When we are alone at last, I hesitate to reach for him. Perhaps that first kiss was a mistake and he regrets having let me touch his lips. Perhaps he is sorry he waited, now that he knows how I am, stone and slow.





	No Unnecessary Space

**Author's Note:**

  * For [novembersmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/novembersmith/gifts).



I am the first one to touch Merrick. I could wish that my fingers were not so clumsy, my flesh so slow to rise to the first brush of skin on skin, but I could not wish this otherwise. He is here, and it is more than I had hoped for, better than I had dreamed. It is sweet to be his first, to touch unexplored flesh, and to be the first to press towards these bounds of ecstasy with him -- but the most important thing is that he is here. He has waited, he has come for me.

What is left of my slow senses can taste him, and it may be that I taste mostly the strong coffee he has drunk, but there is something of him, too, over and under that long-familiar taste.

There is something familiar, too, in the soft and almost deadened feeling that comes from the press of flesh against flesh. I want to beg Merrick to touch me harder, but there are the attendants to keep in mind -- they are hovering, always careful, always cautious. If they were not here with us … if they were not watching...

If there were but world enough, and time. 

But when Merrick smiles at me, there is no space for self-pity, and when he puts his fingers flat on my forearm, when his touch spurs me on, it is easy enough to persuade the attendants to give us some time and space.

"Anywhere you want," I tell him. The words are slow to rise and they bubble, opening slow like hot wax set on leather or string, but I can tell that they find a home in Merrick in the way that his eyes widen. 

It has not been so long since I was a man made of flesh -- and even now, I am no stranger to the desires of the flesh. I can tell that he wants me. 

Time is a fluid thing for me now, sometimes as slow-moving as the thick syrup refined from sugarcane and sometimes as quick as a rushing stream, and it feels like seconds, only, until the attendants have followed Merrick's directions and set us down on the world below, until we two are alone. I want to swallow every breath that he exhales, to cap every one of his words with a kiss. I want to be delicate enough, soft enough, to place a kiss on each of his eyelashes, to feel them flutter against my skin. It feels strange, almost a presumption, to reach for another kiss. It has felt like a day to me, a dawning and an evening, the first day without him. It has been longer for him.

When we are alone at last, I hesitate to reach for him again. I am hit by a sudden doubt. Perhaps that first kiss was a mistake and he regrets having let me touch his lips. Perhaps he is sorry he waited, now that he knows how I am, stone and slow. 

But then, Merrick was always brave, and he reaches me before his quick heart can even beat once, before the door has quite closed behind the last attendant leaving.

"I dreamt of this," he says, and with his hands, without needing a single word, he asks me to show him everything that he has dreamed, everything that we had dreamt together.

I do not have to ask him if there has been anyone else -- I do not need to wonder how he has filled these empty years. He was in my dreams, and I was in his. There were no secrets between us then, and there is no unnecessary space between us now. 

"The greenhouse," he says, and he guides me there, and I follow him. He presses me back into the low soft sofa. His lips look as if they have been bruised with the force of our kisses.

Somehow I know, without being told, that this is the same greenhouse where Jeremiah watched over him, keeping his faith over Harry's grave. Somehow it does not matter that Jeremiah may be outside, still watching, or that all of the other markayuq will soon know what we do together here. Merrick is the only thing that matters in these moments, Merrick and the hot look in his eyes as he urges me on.

He does not tell me that he has missed me -- there is no need. I cover his mouth with kisses and then move lower, touching his shoulder, his shin, his toes. Every inch of his skin is an inch that I will mark.

"Yes -- there -- please," he says when I make my slow clumsy mouth suck a kiss onto his hip-bone. My own flesh is stirring, a slow but welcome change. I want it to rise with him, I want to face a new dawn with Merrick in my arms. 

I did not dream once in all the long years that I spent before I met him -- but if I had dreamt back then, it would have been just a foreshadow of the two of us together. I would have dreamt of the one night we spent, me pressed over him like a human shield. Those dreams would have been the merest shadow of that bliss, that embrace.

Merrick knows, now that we have shared dreams, how I had cherished that night, how every time he had moved in my arms I had come to a hazy half-awakeness, and drifted back to sleep pretending that he was mine in truth.

"Yours," he says now, his lips pressing soft kisses into my hard flesh. His fingers fumble with the fastenings of my waxed leathers. He spreads his palms wide, sweeps them in broad arcs over my smooth skin.

"Yours," I say, and it is a rumble more than a word, but I cannot take the time to spell it out for him in knots. He knows what I mean. He knows that I am his.

He has done the work of preparing himself already. That was a particularly vivid dream that we shared, when I watched him and what his fingers did for me, when I was starting to dance on the edge of waking and far past the border of longing for him. And so it is the work of a minute to slide into him, firm where he is soft. His mouth opens and I chase after it with sweet drugging kisses.

It is deeper than any drug that strengthens a man's veins and lungs against the sharpest air of high mountains. It is brighter than the last light I saw before my eyes became stone, and the world was half-hidden in a haze from me. It is better than any dream. It is Merrick, Merrick who has waited for me -- I drive into him, and the force shakes the sofa beneath us, and his fingers claw uselessly at the hard skin of my shoulders.

I stop long enough for him to tell me if I was hurting him, but instead he urges me on, his legs falling further open and his arms clasping me closer still. I kiss his collarbones, his sternum, his fragile fingers. His skin is all the dearer to me for being new to me, for being real after all our dreams. His heartbeat is the sound that I heard while I slept and was changed, all these years, while I slept without quite knowing what that rhythm was -- it is fast, now, fluttering hard, and I chase it with each thrust. 

Half of me cannot believe that he has waited all these years and half of me cannot believe that he is here now, that he is pulling me closer and urging me deeper. It should be obscene, this merging of flesh and stone, but somehow Merrick makes it seem right. I had dreamt of it, but this is where and how we were without dreams. Nothing can be strange between the two of us.

I was slow to rise to this occasion in my new clumsy flesh and I am slow to soften, too. I make the most of it after I come, while I am still hard, still drawing it out and earning each last gasp of his pleasure. Even after he has finished too, I thrust softly, slowly, rubbing my fingers in the pool of come spread out on his belly. It seems that my body can no longer produce the same, but it had felt like some sweet ascension, all the same, Merrick and I together at its peak.

He spreads his fingers over my shoulder-blade, stroking me, petting me, soothing me, when at last I have slowed and finished my strokes. He does not tell me that he is not sorry to have waited for this -- when we are joined like this, he does not need to say a word. His fingers press the pattern of my old rosary into my new hard flesh, and I press kisses onto his sweat-slicked skin.

They are still like drugs, these kisses, even after what we have now shared. I am half-drunk on them, to have Merrick here in my arms at last, outside of our shared dreams and true in the flesh. Here at last, as he promised and as we dreamed, with hardly a breath of air between us. We will have world enough, and time.


End file.
